What’s in a Book
My literary agent Lucinda Halpern wrote a nice post on what to prepare for a conversation with an agent or publisher. She offers great advice on thinking beyond some of the obvious aspects like audience – though she also stresses the importance of being specific about your audience. She points out how it is important […]
The Future of Manufacturing and the Factory of the Future in a post-COVID World
Early into the pandemic, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Kearney, culled the opinions of 400+ senior-level executives from various industry sectors to identify the best response to the COVID-19 crisis. Five imperatives emerged from the survey that remain highly relevant as we think about the future of manufacturing: Rapid tailoring of manufacturing and […]
Robots in the Beginning
The word “robot” first appears in Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots. It derives from an old Church Slavonic word, rabota, meaning “servitude” and the Czech robotiti meaning “drudgery” and robtnik meaning “forced labor. Matt Simon had a good guide to robots last year in Wired. The first industrial robot was Unimate. […]
The Expanding War with China
The NYSE’s plan to delist three Chinese telcos (China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom) was on, then off, and now is looking to be back on again. The initial decision was driven by President Trump’s November 2020 executive order barring investment in “Communist Chinese military companies,” as well as the the Holding Foreign Companies […]
Archaeology is Going Digital
Big data is often discussed as being this radical alternative to the hypothetical and deductive approach. But in archaeology, it’s providing us with a better generalized model to test against, or to fit alongside, the really localized things we’re doing. That way we can better contextualize the type of micro-historical research that we both think […]
Looking Back, Looking Ahead: How the pandemic shook the industry, the Big Tech backlash, and trade war fallout
In the final #techspansive episode of 2020, Ross Rubin and I recap the biggest stories of the year and look forward to 2021. We analyze the industry’s biggest tech stories, including: —How tech and other industries will take the first steps toward the post-pandemic future —How Google and Facebook will react to their government lawsuits as Apple faces developer […]
The Need to Accelerate Vaccine Distribution
Vaccine Distribution has been abysmal. Governor Cuomo issued an executive order increasing penalties for disregard of vaccine prioritization. While it is perhaps well-intentioned, it is likely the wrong approach. At least right now, scarcity of vaccine supply doesn’t seem to be the problem. In Virginia, we’ve only distributed about 20 percent of the stock of […]
The Physics of Baseball
At any instant, one side of the ball will be moving in the same direction as the air and the other side will be moving against the air. The side of the ball moving in the same direction as the air will have a region of air at higher velocity, and therefore less pressure (Bernoulli’s […]
Zeynep Tufekci on COVID Mutations
Zeynep Tufekci has a great piece in the Atlantic about the COVID-19 mutation first documented in the United Kingdom. Like I her, I discounted the initial news because viruses mutate and there have been many “doomsaying headlines” in the last year related to virus mutation. To understand the difference between exponential and linear risks, consider […]
Battling Zoom Fatigue
Advice for battling Zoom fatigue from business psychologist Stuart Duff, a partner at Pearn Kandola Mr Duff says that companies should try to make video meetings less structured, and that more time should be built in for allowing informal chit-chat. When it does come down to formal meetings by video, he helps his clients to […]
